Welcome Bonuses and What They Might Be

Of course you must read the small print, but if you wish to make the best of your online casino experience, then you should make the very best of casino welcome bonuses.

We will get to the small print a little later, but you will find that most online casinos offer sign up (or welcome) bonuses for new players. These come in a number of different formats but the traditional model is as a deposit matching sign-up bonus.

These kind of bonuses place playing money in your account that matches your initial and sometimes subsequent deposits. Generally they are awarded as a proportion of those deposits, often between 50% and 200% of their value. In terms of size, they may be limited to £50 or so, but some high rolling online casinos award matching bonuses of hundreds and sometimes thousands of pounds; bonuses of £2,000 or so are easily found.

As you might anticipate there is more to these bonuses than the eye catching headline offers, and that is where the small print comes in. Before you sign up to the bonus you should look in detail at all the associated terms and conditions, and often you will need to drill down a couple of pages to locate the fine detail.

Welcome Bonus Requierments

Most, though not all, welcome bonuses have play-through requirements before you are permitted to make any sort of cash withdrawal. For instance, a 100% deposit matching bonus of £100 means you will have deposited £100 and have received a matching bonus, giving you playing money of £200.

• Play-through requirements vary, but 20 to 30 times is quite common. This means that you will need to place £4,000 to £6,000 of bets before you can take out any cash.

If you could use this at games such as blackjack with a 0.5% house edge, then on average you would end up significantly in profit, but unfortunately it is rare to be able to count such low edge games in your play through targets and if you can then they might only could 10%. Generally it is
games such as slots where your bets count 100%.

Notwithstanding the small print, casino bonuses are very valuable; you just need to be aware of how to make the best of them.